interstellar travel

What’s the Most Effective Way to Explore our Nearest Stars?

It was 1903 that the Wright brothers made the first successful self-propelled flight. Launching themselves to history, they set the…

6 months ago

NASA Selects Bold Proposal to “Swarm” Proxima Centauri with Tiny Probes

Humans have dreamed about traveling to other star systems and setting foot on alien worlds for generations. To put it…

9 months ago

Is Humanity Ready to Realize the Dream of Interstellar Travel?

For generations, humans have dreamed, speculated, and theorized about the possibility of journeying to distant stars, finding habitable planets around…

1 year ago

Universe Today Interviews Author, Engineer & Technologist Les Johnson About the 8th Interstellar Symposium

Universe Today sat down with NASA technologist, engineer, and author Les Johnson as he talked about some of the highlights…

1 year ago

A Novel Propulsion System Would Hurl Hypervelocity Pellets at a Spacecraft to Speed it up

A new proposal for a pellet-beam spacecraft could enable interstellar missions and a Solar Gravitational Lens in a matter of…

2 years ago

Lightweight Picogram-Scale Probes Could be the Best way to Explore Other Star Systems

Inspiration for space exploration can come from all corners. One of the most inspiring, or terrifying, sources of inspiration for…

2 years ago

Birds use Dynamic Soaring to Pick Up Velocity. We Could Use a Similar Trick to Go Interstellar

A new proposal for an interstellar mission shows how a solar sail could use the same technique birds do to…

2 years ago

New Calculations Show That an Interstellar Bussard Ramjet Drive Would Need a Magnetic Field Stretching 150 Million Kilometres

A new analysis of the fabled Bussard Ramjet shows that the spacecraft would need an impossibly big magnetic field to…

3 years ago

Avoiding the Great Filter. How Long Until We’re Living Across the Solar System?

According to a new study, humanity could become an interplanetary species in this century, interstellar by the 23rd, and intragalactic…

3 years ago

Sending a Spacecraft to Another Star Will Require a Million Lasers Working Together

New research from the Australia National University shows that millions of lasers are the way to propel Breakthrough Starshot on…

3 years ago